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Adding Voice Service on Top of a WLAN

Enterprises struggle to mix technologies that are hardly meant for each other.

Mixing WLANs with VOIP can be a problem, according to attendees of the recent Internet Telephony Conference & Expo.

"If you think that Wi-Fi is like a LAN and voice is just another application, you will fail," said Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technology at Nortel Networks Ltd.

Rybczynski said 802.11a may be a better option for voice, because that protocol has many more channels than 802.11b. Bandwidth limitations are also a factor. For example, Rybczynski said an 8 Kbps LAN-based call using the G.711 codec balloons into 200 Kbps over a WLAN because of the overhead information that is transmitted with IP packets.